'Collateral' at 20: Peeking at That Inner Damage
It might not be Michael Mann's masterpiece, but it's *a* masterpiece.
A few years ago, I had the chance to interview Michael Mann. He was filming Ferrari in Italy but he needed to promote Heat 2, the novelized sequel (co-written with Meg Gardiner) to his cinematic masterpiece, and the PR person told me I’d get two questions at most, make ‘em good.
So I asked a highfalutin’ thematic question about the book’s protagonist, Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer in the original film), and received an appropriately dense answer about the changeover of crime in the late 20th century from analogue to digital, bullets to bits. “The evolving of Shiherlis as an innovator/proponent of a ‘seismic historical’ transition of crime was exactly the narrative ambition and challenge,” he told me.
As a genre, crime fiction has some major insecurities when it comes to philosophical heft, and with good reason. It’s always trying to outrun its pulp origins. I suspect that’s one reason why the back copy of your typical airport crime thriller tends to boast that it’s the deepest exploration of human wickedness since Conrad; there’s this reflexive need to convince everyone that it’s not just about cheap thrills.
Which brings me to Mann’s Collateral, which just turned 20. It’s not the director’s masterpiece (again, Heat), but it’s a masterpiece when it comes to balancing pulp and a certain thematic density. At its core, it asks a simple question: Why does a noir assassin choose to stalk the rainy streets, their true self buried below an alias and a steely demeanor, isolated from humanity by the nature of their profession? It might be the money—innumerable books and films portray the assassin as a creature of fine suits, expensive firepower, and high living. But their choice of work could also reflect their inner damage, a deep crack in the mindset that renders it impossible for them to do anything else.
Few noir and neo-noir films bother to actually plumb the depths of that damage; the assassin is often a cipher, a relatively anonymous gun, a stand-in for unstoppable Death. Collateral takes a bit of a different approach: it’s a bleak, incisive exploration of all the broken clockwork in a hitman’s head.
When the film begins, that hitman, Vincent (Tom Cruise), has a plan: Upon landing in Los Angeles, he’ll commandeer a taxi and order the driver to take him to a series of addresses, where he’ll kill the targets at each; once that mission’s completed, he’ll eliminate the driver and frame him for the murders. His client, a drug cartel, demands nothing less than perfection. He’s such a ghost that law enforcement doesn’t even realize he exists until relatively late in the narrative, after everything starts going haywire.
When the plan implodes, it’s partially because the driver he picks, Max (Jamie Foxx), turns out to be fearful but resourceful. It’s also clear that Vincent is cracking up. From his perch in the cab’s back seat, he offers up commentary on everything from the universe (“That’s us, lost in space”) to his alcoholic father (“I killed him. I was twelve,” he says, before laughing it off as a joke), and Max’s failed dreams of starting a limo company (“One night you’ll wake up and you’ll discover it never happened.”). At moments, he resembles a gun-toting therapist, compelling Max to grow more of a spine—and revealing his own spiritual wreckage in the bargain.
Mann’s choice to shoot Collateral partly on film and partly on HD digital (specifically, the Thomson Viper FilmStream Camera) adds to the tension. Digital lends a spectacular depth of field to the nighttime shots—as Vincent guns down some neo-Nazi punks in an alley or berates Vincent at a gas station, you can see the black silhouettes of palm trees in the far distance, the glimmer of streetlights and signs several blocks away, the sidewalks largely devoid of people. It highlights the emptiness of Los Angeles at 3 A.M., and how these characters—assassins, cab drivers, cops, cartel members—are operating in a zone far outside the rhythms of normal life.
Digital also lends the movie a cinéma verité feel, even beyond mere handheld. There’s the illusion of informality to it, like you’ve caught the characters on a video recorder without them noticing. You’re up-close and intimate with Vincent’s lunacy and Max’s sweaty panic. It’s a truism that noir (and neo-noir, to a lesser degree) is highly stylized, the deep shadows and camera angles adjusted just-so to convey the characters’ duplicity and inner turmoil; Mann demonstrates that you can achieve the same kind of psychological impact through handheld shakiness, washed-out lighting, and an almost pixelated grain.
As the night’s events become more unhinged, Vincent devolves from a sleek assassin in an expensive gray suit to a bloody mess. “Guy gets on the MTA here in L.A., dies… think anybody will notice?” he offers up near the end, in a moment of existential self-pity. Mann is too streamlined a director to drag the narrative down with thick slabs of backstory, preferring to sprinkle hints about Vincent’s background: from the bad father to the foster home, and from there to killing for the government in some capacity, before embarking on a “private sector” career as a highly paid assassin. Yet we have no idea what lies at the root of his breakdown. Too many years of killing? Too many thoughts of what might have been?
In a way, it doesn’t matter—we’re here for the implosion, not the lead-up to it. Casting Cruise as Vincent was a masterstroke on Mann’s part. When Collateral was filmed, Cruise had already lived most of his life in the public eye, his image polished to a sheen by an army of studio publicists. His grin was high-wattage and seemingly omnipresent in the pop-culture firmament, helping him project an air that was at once insouciant and ultra-competent. But as Vincent, the smile and the polish come off as forced, a dam barely holding back a dark wave of total psychosis. By the end, he even seems vulnerable, and you might be tempted to feel a moment of sympathy for him. In a long career, it’s arguably his finest role.
Jamie Foxx is likewise perfect. As the film progresses, Max evolves in fits and starts into someone capable of facing down a murder machine like Vincent. Nothing about that growth is smooth and controlled—Max’s terror at his situation never really abates, and his best moves are more impulsive than planned. As with Vincent, we don’t learn terribly much about Max’s background, aside from his desire to start a limo company and his strained relationship with his hospitalized mother; one of the film’s nice comic beats is when Vincent compels Max to visit her, then refers to himself as Max’s “friend”—there’s a nice reaction cut to Max incredulous at the thought.
In an ironic twist, Vincent really does come to see himself as a friend of sorts, despite spending much of the film berating his driver/hostage as a loser. Yet Max is much more than a patsy: In his meticulousness (he really likes maintaining a clean cab) and mastery of his profession (he knows all the best routes through a clogged Los Angeles), Max shares some thematic DNA with other Mann protagonists, including Frank in Thief (played with jaw-clenched intensity by James Caan) and Neil McCauley in Heat (Robert De Niro at his chilliest), who are intensely focused on mastering their craft. Mentally, Max has all he needs to survive the night; he just needs a gun to his head to finally activate those instincts.
Mashed together, Foxx and Cruise have significant chemistry, even if they’re dancing a pattern well-worn by previous noir firms. The collision between the respectable and the criminal is one of the oldest tropes in the genre, extending all the way back to films like The Petrified Forest (Bogart, not yet fully Bogie, but cynical as hell) and Suddenly (Sinatra, all slick psychosis). In many of those films, the predations of an assassin aren’t meant to bend the protagonists’ morality, at least not too much—especially in older noirs, there’s the impression that the social order, as represented by the “hero,” must be maintained to some degree.
But in Collateral, Vincent changes Max. How could he not? A night of killing, car crashes, and close encounters with spooky cartel figures will inevitably leave an imprint on your personality. When Max overcomes a lifetime of indecision long enough to crash the taxi with Vincent in it, he uses the latter’s own words against him (“Doesn’t matter anyway, we’re all insignificant out here in this big-ass nowhere, Twilight Zone shit.”), signifying that he’s finally internalized the hitman’s core tenet: If you want to survive, you must improvise and act decisively. A little later, in a subway car, Max takes this learning to another extreme, ensuring his survival. I love the idea of a rootless sociopath in a great suit accidentally turning his intended victim into a much better person; thematically, it’s about as cheerful an ending as you’ll find in noir or neo-noir.
The success of Collateral encouraged other filmmakers to rely on HD digital, which may be a big part of the movie’s legacy. When it comes up in discussion, it’s also often cited as, “That one flick Tom Cruise played the villain in.” That’s an unfortunate reduction. The film’s blistering pace can distract from its fascinating study of what makes a noir assassin tick. Watch it once for the chases through the desolate L.A. night; watch it again and again for the nuances of a twisted mind on the edge of screaming breakdown. It’s a thrill ride; it’s deep in its own way.
Your insightful review will send me back to another viewing.